Photography: Using Flickr

Back in 2004 my brother in law gave me a free year to the photo sharing and storage site, Flickr. I’ve been hooked on it ever since. It offers two membership levels – Free and Pro. When you have a free Flickr account, you can upload 2 videos and 300MB worth of photos each calendar month. The Pro account costs $24.95 a year, and with that you get unlimited uploads of photos and video, along with unlimited storage and bandwidth. To date, I have uploaded 20,236 items to Flickr. Holler!

In my opinion, Flickr is one of the best sharing and storage sites out there (and I have tried them all at this point!) Why? Organization and printing options.

Since I have over twenty thousand photos uploaded to Flickr, organization is imperative – otherwise, I’d never be able to find anything! Flickr does some automatic organization for you – everything is put into an archive, not only by date taken but also by date uploaded.

If you click on a month, you get this:

If you allow your photo equipment to embed your location data, Flickr will even archive by location (or you can add the location later):

Tagging your photos is a very easy way to organize:

My preferred way to organize is to upload my photos into sets. I have 196 sets so far!

You can oven organize your sets into collections – I have collections for my kids, other people’s kids, other people’s weddings, vacations – it goes on and on!

All these different ways to organize allow me to find a picture in under a minute. It’s so helpful for blogging, or when I’m putting together gifts.

Speaking of gifts, Flickr has made it super easy to print out photos. You can even print out the photos of others, if they have allowed that in their privacy settings. Here’s what you do.

First, go to the page of the photo you want to print, then click on the photo so you are in the Flickr Light Box. In the upper right corner is the option “View All Sizes.” Click on that.

Depending on the photo and who uploaded it, you will have a variety of sizes available to download. Click on the LARGEST SIZE, then click download.

Save it to your computer, and then print! Depending on the size of the image, you can print a 4×6, 5×7, 8×10, or 8.4×11 inch photo.

If you want a larger photo, go back to the photo’s main page. Click on actions, then Order prints and more.

You’ll be taken to a Snapfish menu, where you can choose from sizes varying from wallet sizes to a 20×30 poster. You can also have the photo printed on a variety of different items, like photo books, calendars, and canvas.

As you know by now, I have a photo group on Flickr (yet another fun way to use Flickr!) for all of us to share our favorite photos. If you haven’t joined the TSAM Photo Fun Flickr group, please do!

You can find more information on printing from Flickr here, thanks to HP, my awesome photo partners.

Look for me August 3-6 at BlogHer – I’ll be taking photos for a posing tutorial and I need models!

I can’t afford to drive across the county, much less go across the Country….but would they let me go there just to hang out and meet you…..ya know, if I lived nearby? Or would they kick me out at the door?

Lori C. says:

Brenda says:

Thanks for the information and describing how a person could use Flikr. I am curious – how does a person keep the images “private”? I have a friend who had her pictures on a photo storage site – I don’t think it was Flikr, but something similar – she said she had all of her settings set as private as the settings would allow, and one of her photos that she had “stored” on that site showed up in an advertisement somewhere unrelated to the site, without her permission. How do you know that those images aren’t accessed? Just curious. I use iphoto for organization and an external hard drive for storage, but have always been curious how sites like Flikr work – how a person keeps the images from being accessed.

Love the blog – and I love that you keep it real, even though it isn’t always the easy path to take!

With Flickr there are very secure privacy settings. You can control everything from who can download your photos to who can see them. Ihave hundreds of photos that are completely private, and I’ve never had a problem with it!

Aubrey says:

I have a free flickr account. I am probably going to have to go pro though so I can back up my pictures. After losing about a year worth of my sons I don’t mess around anymore. I have an external with 50gb them again on DVDs and I have started putting them up on Flickr too. I am going to need a lot more space though. I am also considering paying for Picnik. Does that come free if you go pro on Flickr?

Thanks, Heather- I had no idea you could print from Flickr so easily with Snapfish! My best friend uploads tons of photos and since we’re “friends” on Flickr I can view the original size. This is a great shortcut instead of saving them all to my hard drive and then uploading them to Snapfish!